An Expanding System

After 1916, the NPS expanded with new Eastern parks and a broadened thematic
and geographic scope. NPS leaders aimed to reach a wider constituency than
possible through Western wilderness parks alone. In 1933, national monuments
held by the U.S. Forest Service; the National Capital Parks in Washington,
DC; and battlefields, forts, and monuments from the War Department all joined
the NPS. The Historic Sites Act of 1935 led to additions of even more historical
parks through the mid-century. Park types diversified from ancient structures
and battlefields to mounds, forts, missions, and presidential birthplaces.
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The NPS was now a leader in historic preservation, and archeology provided
park planners and visitors with information unknowable through texts or
living peoples. But archeology in the parks also had other benefits. Archeology
provided jobs during the Great Depression. Historical architects based park
development schemes on archeological finds. Rangers and archeologists worked
together to interpret excavations to the public. Parks became laboratories
for archeological method and theory. NPS archeology was further proof of
the broad benefits of national parks to the nation. <<
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Nature parks in the Eastern states had archeology, as well. In 1916,
Sieur de Monts NM in Maine became the first national park east of the
Mississippi River. Archeology found Native American settlements, and shell
middens of ceramics
and tools. Ethnographers at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia justified
the displacement of the mountain
people in the 1920s by judging them to be primitive, unintelligent,
and culturally and technologically isolated. Archeology has since dispelled
that myth.

Parks from other Department of the Interior agencies and Washington offices
joined the NPS in 1933. Many had made significant contributions to archeology
since the late 19th century. Rock Creek, a National Capital Park, helped
to resolve an early debate about the antiquity
of human presence in the Americas. Mound
City Group, from the War Department, had yielded information on ceremonial
and social activities in the Ohio Valley dating between 200 BC to AD 500.

Between 1933 and 1943, Federal work relief programs such as the Civilian
Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration employed laborers
who built roads, trails, visitor comfort stations, and other amenities
in the national parks. Laborers also worked with NPS archeologists to
excavate sites and process collections. Ocmulgee,
Fort
Laramie, and Morristown
were among the NPS archeological sites that employed work relief laborers.

Post-war nationalism inspired the public to visit the national parks.
Archeologists recovered the actual foundations of George Washington's
birthplace home. Jamestown
Island in Virginia saw pioneering work in historic sites archeology
to recover the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Archeology
at Independence
in Pennsylvania shows where independence became more than an idea.